Bio
Both an accomplished scholar and a prominent public intellectual, Yarimar Bonilla is a leading voice on questions of race, history, and political culture across the Americas.
Yarimar Bonilla is a professor in the Effron Center for the Study of America at Princeton University and a contributing writer to the New York Times
Yarimar teaches and writes about questions of race, history, and political culture across the Americas. She has tracked these issues across a broad range of sites and practices including: anti-colonial activism, race and social media, the politics of the Trump presidency, and her current research on the political and social aftermath of hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.
Bonilla’s first book, Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment, examines how contemporary activists in the French Caribbean imagine and contest the limits of postcolonial sovereignty. Challenging contemporary notions of freedom, sovereignty, nationalism, and revolution, Non-Sovereign Futures recasts the Caribbean, not as a problematically non-sovereign site, but as a place that can unsettle how we think of sovereignty itself.
Her most recent book project, Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm, (Co-edited with Marisol LeBrón) compiles the narratives of Puerto Rican journalists, poets, artists, and community leaders to show how Puerto Ricans come to terms with not just the impact of Maria, but also the larger, deeper traumas produced by the island’s longer socio-political history.
Professor Bonilla’s next book project— for which she was named a Carnegie Fellow —examines the politics of recovery in Puerto Rico after hurricane Maria and the forms of political and social trauma that the storm revealed. She is also at work on an ethnographic study of the Puerto Rican pro-statehood movement, tentatively titled An Unthinkable State, which examines annexationism as a form of anti-colonial politics.
Professor Bonilla’s work has been fostered by multiple grants and awards from the National Science Foundation, the Mellon foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Chateaubriand Fellowship Program, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, and the W.E.B. Dubois Institute at Harvard University.
Yarimar Bonilla is a professor in the Effron Center for the Study of America at Princeton University and a contributing writer to the New York Times
Yarimar teaches and writes about questions of race, history, and political culture across the Americas. She has tracked these issues across a broad range of sites and practices including: anti-colonial activism, race and social media, the politics of the Trump presidency, and her current research on the political and social aftermath of hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.
Bonilla’s first book, Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment, examines how contemporary activists in the French Caribbean imagine and contest the limits of postcolonial sovereignty. Challenging contemporary notions of freedom, sovereignty, nationalism, and revolution, Non-Sovereign Futures recasts the Caribbean, not as a problematically non-sovereign site, but as a place that can unsettle how we think of sovereignty itself.
Her most recent book project, Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm, (Co-edited with Marisol LeBrón) compiles the narratives of Puerto Rican journalists, poets, artists, and community leaders to show how Puerto Ricans come to terms with not just the impact of Maria, but also the larger, deeper traumas produced by the island’s longer socio-political history.
Professor Bonilla’s next book project— for which she was named a Carnegie Fellow —examines the politics of recovery in Puerto Rico after hurricane Maria and the forms of political and social trauma that the storm revealed. She is also at work on an ethnographic study of the Puerto Rican pro-statehood movement, tentatively titled An Unthinkable State, which examines annexationism as a form of anti-colonial politics.
Professor Bonilla’s work has been fostered by multiple grants and awards from the National Science Foundation, the Mellon foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Chateaubriand Fellowship Program, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, and the W.E.B. Dubois Institute at Harvard University.